First exit polls give victory to Henrique Capriles

Source: ABC.es

The candidate of the Democratic Unity Table (MUD), Henrique Capriles, will outmatch Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez in the presidential elections held on Sunday in the Caribbean country, according to exit polls by firm Variance, despite the lack of closure of all polling stations. The time set for the poll closing was 00.30 Spanish time, however because of long lines, some of them remained open for another hour, until 01.40.

10. My impression is that insisting you've got the election won before the polls close

is a pretty standard thing in Latin American countries. The Sandinistas were doing that in 1990. Weirdly enough, their last rally in Managua was attended by more people than actually ended up voting for them in the entire country.

12. according to my Venezuelan friends who fled for the lives after son & his friends were kidnapped

it's GREAT!

Kidnappings are common in Venezuela. My friends' son was lucky - he was returned in a day without the kidnappers' finding out he was the son of a Chavez opposition leader. If that had happened, the price would have gone up. Kidnappers sell to other "professional" kidnappers if they find their "express" or random kidnappings are big fish.

The security situation is very bad there and Chavez has mismanaged the country's resources. He has also taken over all TV stations except one, and that one he's threatened to take over by force. I'm not sure how that one independent station left has survived.

Capriles has a huge following - everywhere he's gone to speak, the crowds have been about a million each time, or at least in the hundreds of thousands.

2. Sometimes, countries vote for something else.

If Chavez does lose, it does NOT mean that Venezuela voted to give up on socialism(which would mean giving up on anything progressive at all). And it does not mean that Capriles has a mandate to impose Chicago School economics like he secretly wants to.

I've always thought this result was a possibility. But it would be indecent for any DU'er to gloat about it, because it's a sad result if true.

7. If you know what he "secretly" wants to do, it's not a secret.

But in that case, why would he be making such a strong challenge, given that most Venezuelans don't want to give up on socialism (in your view)? Do you know more about what he intends to do than Venezuelans at large do?

The impression I've gotten from journalists on the ground there, BTW, is that neither pre-election polling nor exit polling are very reliable in Venezuela. So yes, the story certainly isn't over.

14. Giving up on socialism..

...is the most progressive thing any society can do.

In every country where self-described Marxists try to create a socialist or communist state, the result is economic stagnation at best, corruption and abuse of state power, and the creation of the worst hellholes on the planet (think DPRK today, Democratic Kampuchea under Pol Pot, Mao's China during the Great Leap Forward, Stalin's USRR during the early 30's).

On the other hand, societies that embrace the capitalist market economy are the richest in the world, and only rich societies can afford to care about things like clean air and clean water.

Unfortunately, socialism, like all religions, has it true believers. But unlike all other religions, socialism is falsifiable because it promised paradise in the here, not the hereafter. And it has failed spectacularly to deliver on that promise.

36. I would have agreed with you 11 years ago, but I'm really becoming less certain

that socialism is any worse than what we have.

Our politicians are corrupted by big money from big business -- and we have lots and lots of big business to corrupt and buy influence in high places.

And then I watch the horrible mistakes that big business, private companies make -- like Enron, like the BP spill, like the scandals in Iraq and Afghanistan with private contractors selling showers that don't work and going on killing sprees for which they don't have to answer. Then there are the pipeline breaks, the chemicals that aren't properly tested, the banks that gamble and then expect taxpayers and the Federal Reserve to bail them out, the recent refinery fires and other incidents forcing refineries in California to close and gas prices to skyrocket. None of these and a myriad of other similar problems caused by big business playing fast and furious without obeying regulations can be blamed on government.

When I was young, very young, the Monday news was filled with reports of traffic deaths. "aTragedies on the highway" they called them.

Car manufacturers kicked and screamed, filed lawsuits and tried to buy politicians, but our government finally put its foot down and required those manufacturers to put seat belts, airbags and other safety improvements into our cars. In spite of their claims that the safety improvements in our cars would cut their profits, it was not those improvements, but the outrageous excesses of the financial sector that endangered our auto industry.

We still have "highway tragedies," but not in the numbers that we had when I was growing up. And it is thanks to our government and in spite of private industry that we can travel more safely.

So, I think that both government and the private sector should play roles in our society and that right now, we are giving far too much credit and leeway to our irresponsible private sector. We don't have to become extremely socialist, but we should understand that when the private side, the corporate end of our society, becomes too influential and too strong (as it is today), its greed and sloppiness get us into trouble.

Both socialism and capitalism in excess and to the extreme can cause great harm.

This is the biggest problem of modern consensual government. As politicians amass more economic power there is a greater incentive for and probability of corruption, as well as economic distortions that result in poor allocation of resources, leading to poor results, higher unemployment, less opportunity, and less ability of a society to fund things that are not essential to immediate survival.

The only answer is to limit the power of politicians to "grant favors." As it is, the regulations for things like getting government contract favor the big guys, who then rely of their "friends" to push a particular agenda.

Socialism, on the other hand, goes in the opposite direction by giving politicians ALL of the the economic power in society. No wonder it is a failure. Modern economies are highly complex, nonlinear systems in which economic information is diffused throughout the system. Under those conditions no governmental body can make a decision for the system as a whole - by necessity such actions will be based on outdated data and be corrupted by the desires of those making the decision. Successful economic activity (such as allocating resources to obtain the optimal return) is an emergent property of a complex system, not one that can be specified in advance. Add to that the corruption that your pointed out, and you can see why socialism is doomed to produce an economic and political result far inferior to a democratic market-caplitalist state.

47. Aside from the corruption in our government, when the market-capitalist side of

the state dominates the democratic-government side, business, the market itself becomes corrupt. Companies are corrupt and then corrupt our government. That is very true of the really big companies in our country -- the banks, the oil and gas companies, the health insurance companies and so many others. The companies themselves are corrupt in both their internal and external dealings. The management cheats and tricks both customers and shareholders.

Even in our democratic market-capitalist state, companies don't obey government regulations. They introduce new products without doing the basic safety research that they should do. We get things like Enron, like the BP spill. And we don't even hear about most of the horrors that occur. Companies lie. If you pay attention, you become aware of their corruption. If gun sales are profitable, then they sell more and more guns no matter what the costs in human lives and in social disruption. A buck is a buck, and being rich, rich, rich makes any price worth it for this market-capitalism at its extreme.

I am beginning to think that the natural course of the free market is not to achieve equilibrium and promote creativity (as I had always thought) but to funnel wealth to a few and promote the formation of monopolies and trusts. I suspect that ultimately the increasing concentration of wealth combined with the increasing oppression of the rest of us will lead to some sort of dictatorship or monarchy.

The dominance of the utterly corrupt monopoly/trust result is what we have gotten each time that we have reduced the checks of regulation and government. The most obvious manifestation of the monopoly/trust extreme appears to me to be the boom and bust which generally results in consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of even fewer companies or people than was the case before the boom/bust cycle began.

We saw that in banking in 2008. We had a huge boom in the housing market so it seemed. In reality it was a boom in the financial sector. Yes, houses were built and sold and bought, but the real boom was in the mortgage industry. Banks grew big during the boom period, and during the bust period, corrupt power in the country manipulated the government and the Federal Reserve so as to do away with some of the smaller banks and we ended up closer to a monopoly than we were before the boom and bust.

And now we will start another cycle. Assuredly the boom will take place in what appears to be some sector of the economy other than finance, but in reality, in the end, the wealth and power will become more concentrated in the hands of the same wealthy people who come out on top in each cycle.

Rockefeller was the master manipulator of the process. It took Teddy Roosevelt and the trust-busting laws, in other words, strong government, to bring a little balance into our system at the beginning of the 20th century. Then, of course, we landed right back in a boom that lead to a bust in 1929 and it took FDR and strong laws to hold back the greed in the stock market and banks.

That held for a long time although we had several greedy surges toward monopoly again. OPEC took us for a ride as we attempted to pay off what we owed for the Viet Nam War through reducing the value of the currency with which we had paid for oil. Then came the 1980s and the S&L crisis, then the dot-com boom of the 1990s followed by ever laxer laws governing the financial sector culminating in the bust in 2008.

Today the small group of the very rich are richer than ever. The lucky among us do well to "own" or owe on a small city lot with a tiny house on it. We now call having the right to pay taxes forever on that small city lot the American dream.

Our system still supports a limited amount of creativity. But the greed and corruption usually crush it before it benefits the majority of Americans.

For many young Americans the entire American dream boils down to having an I-Phone with unlimited texting. Wow! How far we have fallen thanks to the failure of our democratic institutions to master our market-capitalism. I am very disappointed in market-capitalism. It has run amok and has far too many apologists paid to root for it.

15. Chavez is not only a sick man, battling cancer

but a lot of people there find him overexposed to the point of nausea. They've just seen too much of him over the last few years. There are a lot of reasons to oust him. His mistake was not in stepping aside gracefully.

This might just be one of those cleansing things wherein they change parties for one term in order to change presidents but want no change in policy and will elect the head of Chavez's party next time.

I don't think there is a wholesale turn to the right there. If Capriles thinks there is and tries to govern accordingly, I will not be betting the rent on his longevity.

Still, it will be very interesting to watch if they do oust Chavez.

(no, I don't have a horse in this race. While I think a turn to the left has benefited them, I'm not sure Chavez himself has)

The politically savvy in Latin American know that Capriles is simply a pawn of the neo-liberal capitalists. A confidential Capriles document setting out his plan to privatize Venezuela's nationalized oil company and dismantle Chavez's social programs surfaced during the campaign, causing several of the parties who originally supported Capriles to leave his coalition. He is simply another capitalist fraudster.

Capriles was as slippery as Romney in hiding his real policies or changing them to suit his audience. Let's hope the American people are as smart as the Venezuelan people and reject the phony goods. President Chavez has been re-elected for another six year term and his socialist policies will continue to improve the lives of the people here.

16. Releasing "exit polls" while people are STILL voting is a dirty trick

It goes without saying that those still waiting in line in that last hour(who would mostly be the poorest of the poor)would be Chavista. Releasing polls saying that the party THEY back has already lost would have the effect of causing huge numbers of such voters to give up and go home, as was the case in the U.S. in 1980, when the tv networks called the race for Reagan while people were still lined up to vote on the West Coast.

Were Capriles to win by, say, two points or less, the release of those exit polls could call the outcome totally into question.

38. Whatever the first exit polls said,

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez apparently won reelection by a convincing margin Sunday, with allegiance among poor voters to his socialist revolution trumping dissatisfaction with a stunted economy, rising crime and the increasing polarization of society.

With 90% of votes counted, the National Electoral Council said Chavez, a 58-year-old former army colonel, won 54.4% of the vote, compared with challenger Henrique Capriles' 44.9%. Turnout was estimated to be as high as 80%, and there were few reports of violence or other problems.